Update on Webmail Deliverables

‎08-06-200712:40 AM

Further information about the changes we are making for our customers, announced in the webmail incident report are now available. These deliverables were:
1) The ability to change your PlusNet username
2) Get a free .uk domain name
3) SSL encrypted connections for POP3 and IMAP email and FTP
4) Improvements to the ‘Manage my mailbox’ tool
5) The ability to blackhole username@username.plus.com
6) Publishing our spam detection rates on our website for comparison with other ISPs
7) Publishing our new Privacy Policy and Data Retention policies on our portal
Below follows an overview of the changes we are making and associated time-scales.
1) The ability to change your username
We have not been able to identify a straight-forward mechanism for making this change in our systems. As such, requests to change usernames will be carried out manually within our customer support centre. In order to achieve this, customers will be asked to create a new 'free' account and then raise a customer support question/ticket on your existing account containing details of the new username you have registered. The new Help Assistant path to request this will be available via the Help Assistant from the evening of Monday 11th June.
Once a ticket is raised, our support team will swap over the account details as soon as possible. Please note though that this process could take some time (potentially a number of weeks if a lot of requests are raised), and this may require us to call customers during the process in order to collect billing details (These cannot be moved between accounts and are not retrievable by our customer support team).
2) Get a free .uk domain name
We will be offering customers a free .uk domain name from around the 21st of June. Customers will be able to activate this via the member centre home page, and will then be able to register their new domain via our domain registration page (Please note due to maintenance, this page may be unavailable at the time of reading). We will continue to renew the domain, free of charge for the lifetime of each customers account, but a nominal charge of £5.99 will apply if we are asked to transfer this domain to another supplier.
3) SSL encrypted connections for POP3 and IMAP email and FTP
We're working on these options, but due to additional hardware requirements we are currently unable to provide an estimate of when these services will be available.
4) Improvements to the ‘Manage my mailbox’ tool
During the next week a number of changes will be made to functionality within Webmail and the manage my mailbox tool. This includes changes such as:

More search and folder organisation tools for Mailboxes/Aliases/Redirects

Mailbox name limit will be removed when renaming a mailbox

Option on Redirect tab to make it easy to blackhole email

Further functionality improvements for this tool are planned for the coming months and will be announced later.
5) The ability to blackhole username@username.plus.com
In order to allow this we will be making it possible for customers to change the name of any existing mailbox, including the username@username default mailbox. Doing this with the catch-all option switched off will mean that mails sent to username@username will no longer be delivered.
Additionally in the next month or so we will be changing our current Acceptable Use Policies so that customer can remove the Postmaster alias from their account when they have the catch-all switched off. In the mean time, customers receiving spam to the postmaster address are able to create a redirect in order to send postmaster email to the black-hole address: blackhole@abuse.plus.com.
6) Publishing our spam detection rates on our website for comparison with other ISPs
Our network team are currently working on providing this data, but at this time we do not have an estimate for when it will be available.
7) Publishing our new Privacy Policy and Data Retention policies on our portal
These will be published to the policies section of our website before the end of June.